Not a Slurpee Drinker Myself, But . . .

You will be excited to know that participating 7-Elevens – because today is 7/11 – will be giving away 1,000 free Slurpees each. Is this a great country, or what?

ASSUME THE BEST

A substantial friend (if you’re 77 and support more than 30 environmental internships each year, I’d call you substantial) sent me the Maureen Dowd column that reveals the true source of Obama’s funding. ‘Is this true?’ asked my friend – and in a way that suggested he had more than half a mind to think it was. Surely I would have heard about it if it were. And yet there it was in the New York Times, so it had to be true.

A comically absurd Barack Obama smear email is making the rounds right now . . . The email, presented as a June 29 op-ed (replete with The Times’ font, layout, and Dowd byline) presents the “shocking” revelation that Obama’s prodigious Internet fundraising apparatus is really driven by wealthy financiers from — you guessed it — “Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other Middle Eastern countries.”

Comically absurd – but it will be believed by an awful lot of the people who receive it.

Separately, another friend – who used to give the DNC $100,000 at a pop back when that was legal – told me Monday that she couldn’t support Obama because of some terrible things she had come to believe about him . . . that just weren’t true. (And Gore never said he invented the Internet, never did anything wrong at the Buddhist temple, never inflated his and Tipper’s role in Love Story. Kerry never shot himself to get a medal. The Iraqis did not attack us on 9/11. The Jews do not bake cookies with the blood of Arab children.)

I went back to the Chicago Sun-Times article my friend seemed to be referring to. It just didn’t say any of the things she had read it to say, or been told that it said.

People: Assume the best of your fellow Democrats (if you are one) – it’s usually a pretty good assumption. And when you hear something like this about Obama, check out FightTheSmears.com, for starters. A lot of this junk is debunked there.